Janet met Robert in a smoke-filled bar. He was drinking a Seven and Seven, dressed in a killer business suit with his suave looks and his air of confidence that filled the room.

She wasn’t so good looking, draped in a frumpy brown dress. The only good thing about Janet’s dress was that it showed her tits off in a way that would make her mother proud.

“Remember this, my little tulip.” Holding her in her arms, staring down into Janet’s young eyes, her mother would quiver with both joy and embarrassment. “Two things will always get a man: sex and food.”

Janet wasn’t a good cook, but tonight she was going to get this debonaire lawyer from the right side of the tracks.

That’s not what happened though. She ended up hitting on Robert’s friend Mark, a drunken mess that couldn’t stand up straight if you helped him. They ended up having a kid together, but she also found herself a good paying job working with Robert’s law firm, first as a receptionist, then as his personal secretary.

Getting knocked up was the best thing that ever happened to her. Not that she loved her kid, but because it gave Robert a reason to care for her as a personal pet project, his own special girl he used to say. Mark was careless, Janet started dating other guys, and finally decided to file for divorce.

The worst part was when Mark was killed. Janet should have been a wreck, but wasn’t. He was beaten to a pulp outside of Brennan’s, but not before he got his licks in. The punk he rubbed out was the brother of a state trooper, something Larson — or Darson — or Clarkson, who apparently was the first to arrive at the scene. Mark didn’t have a chance, but who really knows?

Janet answered the phone call, giggled, then went to Atlantic City with her new boyfriend. Robert watched the kid, just like he usually did. It was an honor, at least that’s what he told everyone. He didn’t find out until she came back what happened, and even he was shocked when Janet told him.

“Yeah well,” she said, “he probably deserved it.” With a snicker and a giggle, she flipped her hair and poured a drink at Robert’s house, with the cries of her child in the background.

“Hey,” she once asked Robert, “how come you aren’t a dick to me? Why are you such an asshole to everyone else but not me?”

Robert was driving Janet to a drug counseling meeting. “I don’t know,” he said. “You’ve always been good to me, Janet.”

She would carry that to her grave, the fact that Janet Brotski would have the balls of Robert Bridgeford, the most arrogant lawyer in the Northeast, in her hands. That nobody could make this cruel sunovabitch do the things she could, not even his own wife.

Janet smiled with this knowledge every time she went dress shopping. She loved her low-cut dresses.